Nintendo Officially Cancels Nintendo TVii In Europe

I’d forgotten this existed…

This was so long ago, and it has been so irrelevant ever since, that you have probably forgotten about this, but Nintendo TVii was a thing- Nintendo showed it off as a mix of an interactive TV guide/social media for TV application, and promised it would come to all Wii Us worldwide. This… never panned out. The service was only available in North America at launch (and it sucked there too), with Nintendo promising it would be coming to Europe shortly. Two years since the launch of the system, and the only vestige of TVii on European Wii U systems is the TVii icon on the home menu (which only pulls up an error message).

But even that might be about to change as Nintendo have confirmed that they are officially dropping all plans of ever launching TVii in Europe.

“At Nintendo of Europe, we continue to challenge ourselves to develop a range of entertaining experiences for all to enjoy,” they said. “Due to the extremely complex nature of localising multiple television services across a diverse range of countries with varied licensing systems, regrettably we have taken the decision not to launch the Nintendo TVii service within the European region. Although on this occasion we did not anticipate such challenges, we will always strive to develop a range of entertaining experiences for all our users to enjoy.”

To make up for this, they said that they will be making the Nintendo Anime Channel app available in the region; this is a free app that will let users watch episodes of multiple anime, such as Kirby and Pokemon, on their Nintendo 3DS systems for free, without any need for a subscription. New content will be added regularly.

Of course, TVii was a Wii U thing, and this is on the 3DS… hopefully Nintendo brings it to Wii U systems soon as well.